Edmund Devine
In terms of time, it was a period between the dates 5900 and 3750 BC, or 7922 and 5772 years ago. In Climatological terms, it is the period set during the Early Atlantic I to Late Atlantic IV epochs. In terms of Geography, it is the period immediately after 6000 BC, (8022 Years ago), Hudson Bay slush out. Where lakes held back by ice sheets finally broke out and flooded the North Atlantic with icebergs and raised global sea levels. This was the time the English Channel was flooded, the North Sea flooded to the point that the Dogger Banks were at first islands and then submerged for a time which eventually led to the flooding of the Baltic and Black seas.
During this time the Vanir arose out of the Ice Age to find a world more temperate and exploding with more growth than their forebears had seen in the last ten thousand years. These people, now only found in Norse mythology, were in fact the scions of knowledge and culture dating back fifty thousand years. They used this culture to explore the vast world now open to them as the glaciations of the past ten thousand years began to crumble. As such this time period was the first breath of spring and renewed vigor to the lands not cushioned and protected by the equator’s heat.
During this around two-millennium period of thawing and rampant ecological growth, humanity flourished and expanded, many of the so-called ‘ancient’ cultures of today were seeded during this time and were left to sprout in the following centuries and millennia. The global temperature was warmer than even today! Easily 15 F, (8.3 C) hotter than at present. As you can see, this might cause alarm for those who think that in today’s world we face a crisis that may supposedly ‘end the human race’ due to so-called ‘climate change’. Yet it was the very temperatures we fear today that launched the largest and most widespread human colonization, settlement, and migration that we as a species have ever undertaken! By land and sea our species spread out to all the continents of the world, this was a time when Antarctica was visible as a continent! Not as simply an ice sheet! This is when mankind settled most of the new world and established the cultures that were the progenitors of the cultures that the Spanish and Portuguese found in the Americas and whom the descendants of the Vanir, the Vikings, found even before that! Without this time period the world would be much, much different and less diverse a place than it is today, so one must ponder exactly how bad it would be to return to such a period in time when mankind flourished so abundantly in the world.
